Inside the beltway blarney

Updated below:

Thomas Edsall, guest columnist for the month at the NY Times, writes a piece today that is pure inside the beltway blarney (I would use a stronger expletive if this weren't supposed to be a "family friendly" site). It begins as follows.

Can the Democratic Party become fully competitive? Is American liberalism dead, the 2006 election a last twitch of life before rigor mortis sets in? The answer to both questions is yes...

For the Democratic Party to revive, major tenets of American liberalism, economic and sociocultural, will have to be discarded. The party can join Studebaker and the Glass Bottle Blowers union, it can trudge along as No. 2, or it can undergo a painful transformation — without guarantee of success.

To stay in the fight, Democratic leaders will have to acknowledge political realities affirmed by the electorate in 1994 and 2006. Many Democratic constituencies — organized labor, minority advocacy organizations, reproductive- and sexual-rights proponents — are reliving battles of a decade or more ago, not the more subtle disputes of today. Public sector unions, for example, at a time of wide distrust of government, are consistently pressing to enlarge the state. For these players, adapting to a re-emergent center will be costly.

This is just more of the "Democrats can't win by being Democrats, they need to become Republicans lite," crap. Yes, the Dems made some stupid mistakes when they were in power -- none as stupid as the Republicans I might add. But, in many ways, it was the Dems' inability or unwillingness to lead, to acknowledge and defend their liberalism, that was the problem, coupled, of course, with some of the greed and corruption that has characterized the Republicans now that they've been in power.

I just hope the new Dems don't listen to these old, worn out, and wrong from the start messages. The lesson of the past six to twelve years was not that liberalism was dead, it was that the Dems tried to pretend they weren't liberals.

Update:

It seems that Matt Stoller agrees with me, and Atrios agrees with him.